Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980
set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America.

After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the
region's anticommunist hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House
who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for the optimism. For
years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody
counterinsurgency campaigns against leftist enemies.

In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat
Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of
thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political
commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins of the
Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin
Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

Despite his aw shucks style, Reagan found virtually every
anticommunist action justified, no matter how brutal. From his eight years in the White
House, there is no historical indication that he was troubled by the bloodbath and even
genocide that occurred in Central America during his presidency, while he was shipping
hundreds of millions of dollars in military aid to the implicated forces.

The death toll was staggering -- an estimated 70,000 or more
political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the contra war in Nicaragua,
about 200 political "disappearances" in Honduras and some 100,000 people
eliminated during a resurgence of political violence in Guatemala.

The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching
Cold War rationalization, emanating in large part from Ronald Reagan's White House.

Yet, as the world community moves to punish war crimes in the former
Yugoslavia and Rwanda, no substantive discussion has occurred in the United States about
facing up to this horrendous record of the 1980s.

Rather than a debate about Reagan as a potential war criminal, the
ailing ex-president is honored as a conservative icon with his name attached to Washington
National Airport and with an active legislative push to have his face carved into Mount
Rushmore.

When the national news media does briefly acknowledge the
barbarities of the 1980s in Central America, it is in the context of one-day stories about
the little countries bravely facing up to their violent pasts.

At times, the CIA is fingered abstractly as a bad supporting actor
in the violent dramas. But never does the national press lay blame on individual American
officials.

The grisly reality of Central
America was most recently revisited on Feb. 25 when a Guatemalan truth commission issued a
report on the staggering human rights crimes that occurred during a 34-year civil war.

The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights
body, estimated that the conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most
savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s.

Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed
the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four
percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626
massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan
villages are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an
authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded.

The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed
their livestock and crops," the report said. In the north, the report termed the
slaughter a "genocide." [WP, Feb. 26, 1999]

Besides carrying out murder and disappearances, the army
routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before
being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the
report found.

The report added that the "government of the United States,
through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some
[of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave
money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide"
against the Mayans.

"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and
the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for
any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way,
completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman,
Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.

"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations
carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the
Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people, he
added. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]

The report did not single out culpable individuals either in
Guatemala or the United States. But the American official most directly responsible for
renewing U.S. military aid to Guatemala and encouraging its government during the 1980s
was President Reagan.